How crucial is this lecture? (Sine and Tau)?

Thomasa97 · January 9, 2023, 3:35am

Usually these lectures are kind of easier to actually follow along and feel like I learned something. But this lecture and one before it (offset and movement) made 0 sense at all.

College level math concepts were just thrown at us with 1 minute explanations and nothing more. Then we were supposed to understand these totally foreign concepts.

Is this crucial to game dev? Understanding super complicated math concepts just to make something move back and forth?

After this lecture if I was required to do this code again without basically copy and pasting it, I would never be able to do it.

MichaelP · January 24, 2023, 2:21pm

Crucial? No. There’s not a lot of single concepts that will stop you from making games.

That being said, the less tools and tricks you have to allow you to accomplish the job, the harder the job can get. Knowledge can turn some hard tasks into relatively easy tasks.

bixarrio · January 9, 2023, 8:18am

In this case it may have been to move something back and forth, but both these concepts (perhaps not TAU so much) is used in many, many other cases. Should you know it? Well, you could probably get away with googling it every time you need it, but like Michael said, Knowledge. You may not realise that this task you’re stuck with can be solved with a simple Mathf.Sin(...) if you don’t know.

Thomasa97 · January 9, 2023, 8:25am

I want to be able to understand it, but it’s such a new concept to me that I’m not sure what to do.
Continue the lectures and hope it becomes more clear or clicks over time.
Or would I be getting ahead of myself.
I tried looking at the “Math for Game Dev” course.
But that course references things I haven’t learned yet from basic coding. (Example using the ÷ symbol in code for remainders)

bixarrio · January 9, 2023, 8:42am

I don’t think the math in this specific lecture/course is important. It was a means to get something moving back and forth.

Nina · January 9, 2023, 11:20am

Hi Thomas,

Welcome to our community!

I agree with Michael and bixarrio. This lecture is not crucial, and sine and tau are not needed to make a game object oscillate between two points.

Vector3 variables, transform.position and if-statements would have been sufficient. If you want to challenge yourself, you could try to make your game object oscillate with these three things. However, the result will look/feel a bit different because the game object will not slow down near the two points.

Nevertheless, every game developer should at least know that something like sine exists because the sine function is widely used to create certain effects. If you see it somewhere in other people’s code, you should know that it’s “one of those maths methods”.

it’s such a new concept to me that I’m not sure what to do.

Do what the majority of us do when encountering things we don’t understand at the first onset and do not need “right now”: Focus on completing your project. Our days have 24h only. We have to set priorities, and we know that we cannot learn everything there is. We don’t use sine and tau again in this course, so it is perfectly fine to “forget” about them.